McManus: Doubts about drones

When President Obama came to office in 2009, it didn’t take his new administration long to settle on a favorite anti-terrorist tactic: drone strikes.

In his first three years in office, the number of drone strikes against targets in Pakistan and Yemen increased dramatically, from 35 in 2008 to 121 in 2010, before dropping back to 79 so far this year, according to the Long War Journal, a website that has attempted to keep track of reported strikes.

The number of people killed by the strikes — al-Qaida terrorists but also local militants and, inevitably, some civilians — escalated too; estimates vary widely, but at least 3,000 have died in both countries combined.

And that has led to second thoughts, not principally for ethical reasons (officials say they have always tried to minimize civilian casualties) but for practical ones.

Drone strikes are undeniably effective at eliminating terrorists. But too many drone strikes can also provoke a political backlash, recruiting as many terrorists as they kill.

Increasingly, that critique is coming not only from human rights organizations or cautious diplomats at the State Department but from veterans of the secret war against terrorism.

“We’ve crossed a line ... from using drones against known terrorists to using them more broadly against whole groups of militants,” Robert L. Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, told me last week. “It plays into the narrative that portrays the United States as an enemy of Islam.”

In fact, a Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of Pakistanis who viewed the United States as a friendly country has dropped since Obama took office, from 19 percent in 2008 to 12 percent this year.

In Yemen, where U.S. drone strikes have killed dozens of suspected terrorists, the local affiliate of al-Qaida has grown.

It will be difficult to disentangle the United States and its drones from the internal conflicts of Yemen or Pakistan. On those battlegrounds, argues Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, “our drones have become the counterinsurgency air force for those governments.”

Nobody contests the right of the United States to strike at terrorists who pose an imminent danger to U.S. citizens. But when the United States secretly uses armed force in another country’s internal conflict, “it sets a dangerous precedent,” he said.

Congress has shown no great appetite to legislate the war on terror. But reining in drones — holding them to their original use against terrorists who pose an imminent threat to the United States — would be a good idea.